Tant: Better than 'Tweedledee and Tweedeldumber'

Posted: Saturday, July 01, 2000

''Election 2000 just got hotter than high school love,'' laughed Texas populist Jim Hightower as the tiny but growing Green Party nominated consumer activist Ralph Nader as its presidential candidate at a small but spirited convention in Denver last week. ''This is not a political campaign but a call to arms,'' added Hightower, an author, activist and Lone Star State radio talk show host who is a refreshing, progressive change from the small-town, small-minded Rush Limbaugh wannabes who clog the dial on most of the more and more monopolized radio stations in America.

Ed

Tant

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Nader's campaign provides a refreshing, progressive change from the White House quests of both major corporate-front political parties. While Bush and Gore gush and bore an increasingly turned off electorate with political platitudes and mealy-mouthed mendacity about ''compassionate conservatism'' and ''political progress,'' it is Ralph Nader who brings a new style, vocabulary and constituency into Election 2000. While Bush and Gore are interchangeable organization men for politics as always and business as usual, Ralph Nader represents the last best hope for needed changes in this country through both voting and direct action street politics.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the voting booth, along comes Ralph Nader with his clarion call for ''community-based patriotism,'' ending corporate welfare and rejuvenating a body politic made jaded and anemic by both the major ''Tweedledum and Tweedledumber'' Demopublican and Republicratic parties. Nader and the Green Party are a needed change and challenge in an America where ''liberals'' have become conservatives and ''conservatives'' have become big spending, big government corporate statists.

Nader reached out to conservatives by asking in his acceptance speech, ''Don't conservatives, in contrast to corporationists, want movement toward a safe environment, toward ending corporate welfare and the commercialization of childhood?'' He added that ''Green values are majoritarian values, respecting all people and striving to give greater voice to all voters.''

He also reached out to disenchanted liberal voters by blasting the ''corporate paymasters'' behind the Gore campaign. Unlike any other candidate, Nader in his acceptance speech in the Mile High City hammered American ''plutocracy'' and unlike any other party except the Libertarian Party, Nader blasted the two-party predations of the ''drug war'' and drew a standing ovation with his endorsement of legalized industrial and medical hemp.

Predictably, Gore campaign apparatchik Chris LeHane led the chorus of Democrats who wailed that citizens are ''throwing away their vote'' if they cast a ballot for Nader, a third-party candidate who is already being branded as a ''spoiler'' in an expected close race between mainstream corporate candidates Gore and Bush. While bleeding-heart liberals and crybaby conservatives both urge a vote for their clone candidates, Nader answers the ''spoiler'' charges by saying, ''You can't spoil a spoiled political system.''

Indeed, the political system is spoiled when candidates like Nader, Libertarian Harry Brown and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan are excluded from ''debates'' that are more and more a showcase for the candidates of the two-party duopoly and their big business bosses. Nader and the Green Party should shake up the staid and stodgy politics of corporate America in the year 2000 just as the third-party Socialists of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas challenged American plutocracy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with campaigns that led to votes for women, improved wages and hours for workers, and more justice for racial minorities.

Nader is waging a 50-state campaign that already is making inroads with traditional Democratic constituencies like blacks and labor unions, and his Web site is already popular just days after the Green Party Convention in Denver. The time is now for Americans to put aside the Democratic and Republican politics of plutocracy and plunder. The time is now for Americans of every political stripe to take another look at the crusader Ralph Nader who in Denver last Sunday breathed new life into the words of the Roman orator Cicero, who said, ''Freedom is participation in power.''

Ed Tant has been an activist since 1968 and a journalist in Athens since 1974. Write him at P.O. Box 912, Athens, GA 30603-0912.